The Taboo Transformation Ch. 01

Suddenly Horny

Part One of The Taboo Transformation

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~~ All characters in this book are over 18. ~~

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Doctor Jane Richardson stared at the computer screen, torn between flat disbelief and incandescent rage.

"...we agree the therapy proposed in Project Pygmalion holds much promise and the preliminary tests are encouraging. And also that, in the future, genetic modification of humans may become standard practice. However, the current political climate, both in the United States and worldwide, is far too conservative to overcome where such therapies are concerned.

"Therefore, we are ordering this project to be placed on hiatus until such time as the Science Advisory Board sees fit to revisit the issue. Dr. Richardson will, of course, hold title to such patents as she has already registered (see subsection C), and will share in the profits this project will generate, if and when it becomes an approved medical procedure in the future.

"For the time being, all collected genetic samples from the individuals who have generously donated to this project are to be destroyed. New samples will be collected if Pygmalion is revived.

"Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Gustavo Aguilar

Vice President of Research and Development

Chairman, Science Advisory Board

Darwin Pharmaceuticals and Laboratories

Jane shook her head, her short fingernails biting into her palms. Six years! Six years of research, six years of progress, six years of incredible discovery of what was possible in the manipulation of the human genome. Six years, until she and her team had been on the verge of a breakthrough which would make the discovery of antibiotics look like a child doodling with crayons.

And these timid, bureaucratic idiots were canceling her project! Oh, they might give lip service to it merely being placed on 'hiatus.' But she had been working in the research field long enough to know what that really meant. The project was scrapped, consigned to the dustbin, while other companies would have the opportunity to take advantage of their timidity. Aguilar and the so-called "Science Advisory Board" had never been fully committed to Pygmalion in the first place. She wondered dully what incident had pushed him from half-hearted support to pulling the plug.

And the gutless cowardice of doing it now! Late on a Friday afternoon when every executive she could plead her case to would already be out on the golf course or on their way to their beach houses or weekend homes. She herself, thinking approval for submitting Pygmalion to the FDA for formal clinical trials was a mere formality, had been due to start a long-overdue vacation. The tests in the lab had been so overwhelmingly positive she hadn't been able to imagine any other result. But now, by the time she got back, Pygmalion would be all but forgotten. Another project sent to the Island of Misfit Toys.

She glanced around her spotless research lab, safely tucked into a corner of a nondescript office complex in suburban Minneapolis. Her assistants were getting ready to head home for the weekend. Several refused to meet her eyes, having somehow already heard through the grapevine that something she had dedicated her life to had become a victim of internal office politics.

She couldn't bear to sit at her desk any longer. One more minute and she would lose her temper entirely and start heaving coffee mugs and centrifuges through the plate-glass windows at one end of the brightly-lit room. She stood and stalked out, her long legs carrying her rapidly down the hall, past the employee lounge, until she entered the unisex bathroom reserved for department heads. She slipped into a stall and sat on the toilet, her head in her hands. She took a deep breath, then another, trying to calm herself, to blunt the bitter edge of disappointment.

It wasn't the financial loss that hurt so badly, although Pygmalion, if it was ever approved by the feds, would probably make her a millionaire dozens of times over. But she already had more money than she knew what to do with, thanks to lucrative windfalls from other, earlier successes. Rather, it was the betrayal by an organization she had come to trust, and the brutal way hope had been extinguished for so many people who would never even be aware of the disease-free future which had been snatched away from them.

The door opened and closed, admitting two figures. She kept quiet as she watched them warily through the crack in the stall wall.

"How's it going, Tim?" one asked. She recognized the voice of Jack Reynolds, the lead researcher on another project.

"Not bad, man," Timothy Chang replied. "Big plans for the weekend?"

"Sure do. I'm taking Sheryl up to Lake of the Woods. And if she isn't walking bowlegged by Sunday night, I'm not doing my job."

Jane grimaced. Pig.

"Hey," Tim said. "Did you hear about Richardson's project getting the ax?"

"Sure did." Jack's voice was smug. "I don't know what she was thinking. The board has been hinting at her for months that it was a no-go. I don't care how revolutionary her gene-splicing technique is. There's no way it would be approved for human use. The fucking liberals can't even tolerate GMO crops. They call it 'frankenfood.' And a lot of religious people think that any sort of genetic modification is interfering with 'God's Plan.'"

"Poor old Plain Jane." Tim's voice was sympathetic. "Didn't you two hook up at the Christmas party last year?"

"Don't remind me. She had a few too many and got out on the dance floor. You remember that red dress she was wearing?"

"Not really."

"Well, she's got those long legs. And I wanted to see if they went all the way up." Jack laughed coarsely. "Didn't take much convincing to get her up to my room. But once I got her clothes off, I might as well have been fucking a board. No. Worse. You can at least lube up a board. Slip some lard around a knothole and go at it."

"Dude, man. Stop." Tim sounded disgusted. Whether it was by Jack's sexism or his crudity Jane couldn't tell. Her eyes brimmed with tears of helpless rage.

"Well," Jack went on blithely, "she was flat as a board and dry as the fucking Sahara. It's like her pussy didn't even know what to do. And her tits! She doesn't have any, man. I knew she didn't have much of a chest, but Jesus, it was like she was a ten-year-old boy up there. Decent nips, maybe. But nothing else. I mean nothing. I don't know why she even bothers to wear a bra around the office. She sure as hell doesn't need to."

"All right. Forget I asked." The sound of running water came from the sinks, then the sound of the door opening and shutting.

Jane stumbled out of the stall, only to see Tim still standing in front of the mirror, drying off his hands with a paper towel. He looked at her, then away, shamefaced.

"Jane. Jesus. I'm sorry. I didn't know you were in here. Jack's not a bad guy, really, he-"

"He's not? Really? You could have fucking fooled me," she spat. Turning on her heel, she strode out of the room.

*****

Why are you surprised? It's nothing you haven't heard a hundred times before.

I'm not. Not really. I knew he was an ass. I thought maybe he could keep what happened last Christmas to himself, though.

The lab was deserted. Everyone had gone home. She sat at her desk, surveying the wreckage of six years of work. She had moved all the relevant technical files to a secure server and locked them with her personal encryption key. No one but her would be able to access them.

One last thing. Then it's over.

Using her passkey, she entered the refrigeration unit where the precious genetic samples were kept. The results of nearly two years of pleading, cajoling, and in three cases, outright bribery, their value to her research was literally beyond price. One case held the original blood samples. Another the prepared injections which would have been given to the volunteers, had their project gone to clinical trial.

Jane picked up one of the small, heavy boxes and lifted the lid. One hundred and forty-four vials, arranged in twelve rows of twelve, met her sorrowing gaze. Numbered by date and donor ID, they would have been the basis for the clinical trials with the FDA.

No. I will not do this. I will not destroy six years of work because of the small-minded fears of a group of ignorant men who don't know the difference between a blastocyst and a chromosome.

She carried the box down to her lab. A quick perusal of the facility turned up a spare sample box and sufficient test tubes to fill it. Tap water, dye used to color specimens and bacteria culture, and a bit of cellulose to thicken the mix gave her a reasonable facsimile of the samples. Twenty minutes' work on the computer, and she had labels printed out that matched the ones on the original batch.

This is crazy. Nuts. If they catch me doing this, I'll be a horror story they use to frighten lab assistants for decades.

She snickered in black humor. Well, if you can't be a good example, be a warning.

She shoved the true sample box into her shoulder bag, then picked up the counterfeit and walked down to the incineration area.

"Hello, Dr. Richardson."

"Hi, Jake," she smiled. "One last stop before I go on vacation." She juggled her computer bag, her purse, and the sample box, and finally shoved the latter towards him. "Here you go. One hundred and forty-four genetic samples."

He nodded sympathetically. "I was told you might be coming down here. I'm sorry to hear your project was canceled."

"Not canceled." Jane didn't need any acting ability to make her smile bitter. "Put on hiatus. As if that makes it any better." She heaved a long sigh. "You'll forgive me if I don't stick around to watch the greatest advance in medicine since germ theory go up in smoke. Have a nice weekend, Jake."

She turned and headed for the hallway which would lead her towards the exit, her heels clicking on the tile floor. Sweat beaded on her brow, and the heavy shoulder bag dragged with every step. She imagined she could feel Jake's eyes boring into her back. Would he buy her performance and destroy the fake samples? Or would he take the time for a proper analysis, and expose them for the clumsy counterfeits they were?

"Doctor Richardson? Doctor Richardson! Stop!"

Her heart sank like a brick thrown into a pond. She halted and forced her unwilling feet to turn, plastering a fake smile across her face.

Jake pelted up to her, her leather laptop bag held in one hand. "You forgot this," he said with a grin. "You would have felt pretty silly if you had to come back for this while you were on vacation."

"I would have," she agreed, sliding it over one arm. "Thanks, Jake."

*****

Less than an hour later she pulled her Jaguar into the garage of her house, a sprawling, two-story affair in one of the nicest suburbs of the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. She was happy to see the kids were home, their cars parked neatly in their spaces.

"I'm home!" she called, walking in through the door which connected the garage to the house itself.

"Hi, Aunt Jane," her nephew Zach said. He looked up from his video game in the living room, where he was, apparently, blasting apart a horde of alien zombies.

She leaned over the back of the couch to give him a kiss on the cheek. "Where's everyone else?"

"Colleen is out in the pool, doing laps. And Lillian is upstairs, Facetiming with the flavor of the week," he replied.

She looked at the clock, which already approached seven-thirty, even though the sun was still shining in the western sky. "And whose turn was it to make supper tonight? Or do I have to ask?"

"It was yours. But I put out some meat to thaw in case you wanted to save some time. You're usually late getting home on Fridays."

She shook her head. "I really don't feel like cooking tonight. What do you say to ordering in some Chinese?"

"Sounds good to me." He put down the controller and stood up, stretching to his full height of six foot two. Like Jane and his sisters, he had inherited the genes which made their entire family tall and lanky, although he did not have to deal with the flat-chested burden of being a woman with the Richardson lineage.

"Great," Jane said. "Drag your sister out of the pool and find out what she wants. I'm going upstairs to change, but I'll see if I can pry Lillian away from her boy-toy. We can place the order and have ourselves a nice night here at home."

Luckily for her, Jane didn't hear the sound of conversation as she climbed the stairs. "Knock knock," she said, tapping on the door frame of her younger niece's room.

"Hi, Aunt Jane," Lillian said, flashing her a quick smile as she looked up from the magazine she was reading.

"Zach told me you were Facebooking with your boyfriend."

"It's Facetiming, Aunt Jane," the dark-haired, dark-eyed college freshman said with a laugh. "But we're done. He had to go to work. And he's not my boyfriend. Just...a friend."

"With benefits?" she teased.

"No," her niece said, with a twinkle in her eyes. "At least...not yet. Nate's got some work to do before he gets those sorts of perks."

"I decided I don't feel like cooking tonight," Jane said. "I'm ordering in some Chinese take-out. Come on downstairs in a couple of minutes so you can tell me what you want."

"Will do."

*****

"So how was work today, Aunt Jane?" Colleen asked.

She grimaced and put down a forkful of pork-fried rice. Cartons and bags of Chinese food were scattered over the polished surface of the oak table in the dining room, where they had all gathered to eat. That had been one of the rules she had laid down when Zach, Colleen, and Lillian had come to live with her twelve years ago. That they would eat the evening meal together as a family, not staring blank-eyed at the TV set, eating on the couch.

She felt a pang as she looked at the three of them. Her sister's death had left a hole in her life that had never really gone away. Elizabeth Richardson had been a fashion model, and her tall body, subtle curves, and overwhelming self-confidence had catapulted her to a life on the runways of Milan, Paris, and New York. Clothing designers had competed to dress her in the latest trends, and she had taken to that high-pressure world like a duck to water. For years she had lived a glamorous life, taking and discarding lovers as she pleased, and in the process bearing three children. The gossip magazines had gone into a frenzy with each new liaison, but she had loved her children with a fierce, protective passion. Colleen, her first child, was the daughter of a Swedish pop star. She had been followed by fraternal twins Zach and Lillian, the children of an Italian soccer player.

When Liz had been killed in a freak fall from a horse during a photo shoot, the children had come to live with her. Their fathers had never been seriously involved in their lives, and Liz had made sure the kids had the opportunity to get to know their Aunt Jane, visiting her on her frequent trips back to the states. Still, it had been an awkward transition as the four of them grew used to living in the same house together. Eventually, however, they had grown into a loving, happy family.

"Not so great, Colleen," she said at last. "My main project was canceled today."

"What?" Her niece looked outraged, and Jane hid a smile. It was the same expression she had whenever one of her loved ones was snubbed. She remembered her furious reaction when Zach had been left off the all-star team in his baseball league when he was fourteen, and the e-mail she had written to the committee, which practically dripped vitriol. "How long have you been working on that? Five years?"

"Six," she said shortly, putting down her wineglass so firmly the glass rang on the wooden table, the red liquid threatening to slop over the edge of the glass. The years of wasted work made her anger boil up again.

"What were you working on?" Zach asked. "Can you tell us?"

She hesitated, thinking about the non-disclosure agreements she had signed when she had started at Darwin. To hell with it. I burned those bridges when I brought the samples home. If anyone ever finds out what I did, breaking confidentiality paperwork is going to be the least of my problems. And besides, if I can't talk about this with my family, who can I talk to?

"Oh, it wasn't anything important, Zach." Her voice could have etched steel, it was so acid. "Just a genetic therapy which would have made a subset of women more attractive." Her lips quirked as the kids looked at her in surprise. "But that was just the beginning. If the FDA trials had been successful, we would have gone on to the real purpose; genetic therapy for those who were born with genetic diseases."

"But Aunt Jane, that's incredible!" Colleen said. A pre-med major at Minnesota, she grasped the ramifications of what Jane was saying much more quickly than her siblings. "How did you do it?"

"I came up with a brand-new gene-splicing technique," she replied, with understandable pride. "But the...those..." she stuttered on her fury. "My superiors decided the time wasn't right. That people would be scared of this sort of mad-scientist scheme. And a lot of people," she conceded reluctantly, "are honestly afraid of things they don't understand. Or have religious objections."

"Idiots," Lillian said flatly. "There were people who didn't like a lot of other parts of human progress. It doesn't mean they were right." She snorted. "I bet there was some guy named Ook criticizing his son when humans invented the wheel." She let her voice fall into a caveman accent while Zach and Jane laughed. "Dragging rock through mud always good enough for me. Why young kids use fancy wheels and axle? Grunt."

"And using God is just a cop-out," Zach, who was a political science major at the University of Wisconsin, added. "Hell, back before the Civil War, you had preachers defending slavery. Saying it was God's will."

Jane nodded glumly. "Well, it doesn't make any difference now. But it makes me so damn mad. I had a chance to do something truly great. Revolutionary. My name would have been remembered, like Pasteur and Salk and Franklin. Now it will be some other group, now that we've quit. I know for a fact there are at least five other companies world-wide who are trying to do the same thing I am. My money's on Albright and his team in Edinburgh. The man is so smart it's scary."

"Couldn't you...go public?" Colleen asked hesitantly. "If you called a press conference and told everyone what you know, there's no way Darwin could shut you up. Especially if you had proof."

"Of course they could," Jane said. "All they would have to do is hire a few publicity hacks to make me look like an unbalanced ex-employee. Because that's what I would be as soon as I opened my mouth. They've got me wrapped up in so many confidentiality agreements that if I even breathe about what I'm working on I'd be fired immediately. And then they'd go after me in the press, to make me look like some sort of kook. Never underestimate the power of money, Colleen.

"But don't worry about it," she said. She squared her thin shoulders as she looked at the kids. "It's not the end of the world. I've got other ideas in the hopper at work. And we'll be more than comfortable here. Heck, the money on the patents for Notosterone will keep us well-fed for years."

"You got that right," Lillian said. "None of my girlfriends will go to bed with a guy unless he's using it."